I look at life a bit differently, and like to post my weird thoughts. I like musicial instrument repair and woodworking. For trying to live a somewhat normal life, a lot of weird things happen to me. Instead of putting up with it, I post about it in this blog.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Lumber!

Sept 24, 2009

Current mood:exhausted

I have been busy this past week. For some reason I have managed to come into possession of a lot of wood. (Note: When I say I, I mean myself and my Dad.) Big, chunky style hunks of lumber. Although, technically it's not lumber yet. I need cut it into nice slabs suitable for making guitars. Maybe I should start at the beginning.

On Monday I headed over to St. Pete. to meet up with a furniture maker who had a lot of leftover wood. I got there, and he had a good amount of wood. He had some below average quality boards of Pau Ferro. Of course, he called it Monkeypod. I have no idea why the idiot locals call it that. I know Pau Ferro is hard to say for some people. I even understand calling it Brazilian Rosewood, even though it's not in the Rosewood family. I understand calling it some of the other half dozen names, but Monkeypod is just beyond stupidity.

These boards were still pretty rough so I'm not sure how good they look. They were very dried out, so that was nice. Although, they were in pretty rough condition. I hope I will be able to get some useable wood er... lumber out of it.

I also got a few cut offs of some variety of South American Rosewood. They were chunky cutoffs, so out of the three pieces I got I may be able to get about 2 guitar fretboards out of it. Maybe.

I also got a huge slab (5 foot by 2 foot by 6 inches thick) of what the guy called Flame Tree. It was heavy as Ebony. I also tore my gut trying to move it. The whole slab must have gone over 200 pounds. It was a beast. The weird thing is, when the wood is exposed to light for a long time it turns a yellow/orange type color. It is a very vivid color, and I've never seen anything quite like it.

So I got to looking up what a flame tree was. Problem is, there's about 10 different types of Flame Tree. Luckily, I was able to I.D. it pretty fast thanks to the internet. It was a Austrialian Illawara Flame Tree. Sometimes called a Bottletree. Although, it didn't tell me what it was used for. In fact, I can't find too much info on it except that it is from Austrialia, and it grows pretty big.

So that completed Monday. Today (Thursday) I ended up heading to Holiday (south of New Port Richey, and next to Tarpon Springs) to see a guy about a downed Pecan tree. When I got there I was shocked. The bottom of the tree was 5 foot across. It was huge. There were 5 guys who came there before us, and took what they wanted, and there was still most of a tree there. Actually, it was beyond huge. What had happened was that the tree had been hit by lightning, and died. Pieces of it had then hit the neighbor's house when a storm came. So the owner paid a tree company $2000 to cut it down. They wanted even more to haul it away, but he didn't have that much money.

So there were a lot of pieces 3-4 foot across, and 1-2 foot thick. They must have weighed 200-400 pounds a piece. We loaded up the trailer with some of the smaller pieces which only weighed 50-100 pounds a piece. We must have loaded the trailer with over 2000 pounds of pecan wood. It's still out there in the trailer. I'm going to have to unload it tomorrow. It's out there right now, mocking me. All 2000 pounds of it.

I'm not even sure when I may get to use any of this, but it's good to have around. It gives the snakes and bugs someplace to hide until I decide to use it.